“So in the end, what pleases the spectator and can it be repeated? Why leave the comfort of one’s home and what are we going to see? This was more or less the question I asked myself when entering the Petit Théâtre Mercelis to see Horizon TröM by Thomas Israël. Immediately I experienced a sense of relief: the spectator is not ‘taken hostage’ here by a pompous text or artificial stage business, but meanders dreamily through the scenographic installations, the visual and auditory stimulations. Horizon TröM is a show which ‘lets’ itself be seen, in the strongest sense of the term. We are therefore given all the time we need to feel at home. The absence of physical separation, the proximity of actors whispering text in your ear, suddenly make you want to become an actor yourself — by mysteriously approaching someone, for example, or crossing the stage, which has become an open space for the contemplation of other spectators. Fleeting encounters sometimes take place in the space of a glance, or in a complicit smile. Horizon TröM is a show about dreaming and death, during which people come to look at one another, among humans. We are ourselves, we are others and then we disappear in turn, just as we had appeared.”

 “I want to efface the distance between the body of the work, the body of the artist and the body of the spectator, who for me is wandering in the gap where these two other corporeal flows meet. My primal fantasy is to achieve total impregnation and fusion. The means to bring this about is in immersive, participative work: hence my three tall projections of Peeping Tom, the encapsulating Méta-crâne (Meta-Skull) and the TröM bed; hence Rivière noire (Black River) where my physical body becomes the work; hence also Percept, in which a full-size body is projected at very close range to the spectator. The poetic force that is released from certain works is the only means I know to evacuate what separates the physical from the mental, to attempt to bring together this body-mind reality.”